Saturday’s Line-Up: Secrets to Successful Networking and Teaching

It’s no accident that many of the sessions and speakers at this year’s Education Forum in Minneapolis deal with a similar topic: making connections. Networking and building relationships are a key part of professional and personal growth — and skills that we all should make an effort to bolster. Saturday’s featured speaker, Emmy award-winning filmmaker and author Mark Scharenbroich, will help us understand how to strengthen these valuable skills.

Scharenbroich has spent his entire career working in both education and business, discovering how organizations and leaders build a culture that encourages personal and professional growth. His book, Nice Bike: Making Meaningful Connections on the Road of Life, offers food for thought and advice for building relationships both at and outside of work.

“Nice Bike acts as a powerful catalyst to help build stronger, more unified teams,” said Scharenbroich. “The message inspires audience members to be more engaged and passionate about connecting with others.”

Among other things, Scharenbroich’s address will touch on:

• Acknowledging others by being fully present
• Honoring the contributions of fellow team members to create a strong organization
• Nurturing memorable moments that build a rich culture of compassion

Be sure to catch his talk, “Making Connections that Move People,” at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. To read more about him and his work, check out his website or follow him on Twitter at @NiceBikeMark.

Immediately after that at 1:00 p.m., you’ll want to shift gears and head over to the “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning” session, where Peter C. Brown and PAEA’s own Sara Fletcher, PhD, will challenge your current assumptions about how students learn and study. This is the perfect opportunity for PA educators to better understand how to help their students learn effectively.

A retired planning and marketing consultant turned novelist, Brown is also co-author of the session’s namesake book, now a Harvard University Press bestseller. The Chronicle of Higher Education writer James Lang called the book, “The single best work I have encountered on recent findings about the human brain and how we learn.” (Read more about Brown on his website.)

Fletcher is PAEA’s chief academic officer. She has been an educator for 16 years, having taught at both the primary and university levels and served as a public school administrator, and has also designed curricula for local and national audiences. Prior to joining PAEA, she served as director for medical education at Wake Forest University, where she worked with the PA program conducting student admissions interviews, serving as an external reviewer for an accreditation site visit, and facilitating problem-based learning for small groups.

In this interactive session, Brown and Fletcher will share the big ideas from Make It Stick by helping participants understand the science of learning drawn from recent cognitive research as well as offering ways to help their students better learn the material.

“I have experience as a classroom teacher in the elementary and secondary grades, as well as in higher education in the school of medicine,” said Fletcher. “My portion of the session is about modeling the implementation of practical strategies that help improve learning outcomes.”

We’re especially excited about this year’s speaker lineup and don’t want you to miss all that’s happening on Saturday — which is a big day for the Forum this year. Stay tuned for more about our other featured speakers in the coming weeks.